Graduate Student Senate passed its first amendment Tuesday to allow for more research funding to be pulled from the travel fund.
The resolution allows for funds that were meant to go toward the travel fund to be moved to other places. The funds were originally supposed to be used for travel awards but can now be used for research-based business and conference trips.
“What we would do is we would reduce the travel reward funding from $500 per award to $150. We ... decided that that amount of funding would be sufficient to cover things like conference registration fees or the like,” Brett Fredericksen, department representative for environment and plant biology, said.
The resolution will be in effect through the rest of Fall Semester, Spring Semester and throughout the summer. Moving the funds will allow GSS to fund more research and get the funds out to graduate students as soon as possible.
“We, in the last year, increased the reward to $1,000 per grant, and we’re able to reward usually 25. This resolution is going to change the amount that we can reward to 40, so there will be 40 people that can get up to a $1,000 grant for their research,” GSS President Kaelyn Ferris said.
There is a review committee that looks at the applications of the graduate students who want funding for a project. The committee gives its decision of who gets funding to the Graduate College, and the Graduate College then disperses the funding out, Ferris said.
The travel grant is a lottery-based grant. That grant is for traveling to a conference that is out of Athens. The recipient is given $500 to pay for hotel and conference expenses, among other things.
There is not a review process for this grant. There is a pool of applications, and they are pulled until the grant money runs out, Ferris said.
When graduate students apply for the travel grant, they are required to say which conference they will be going to. After the student returns, they have six months to provide a list of expenses. If the total does not add up to $500 or $250, they have to return the remaining balance to the university, GSS Treasurer Amid Vahedi said.
“The idea is to shift from a $500 travel grant to a $150 one and then use the extra money to increase the number of grantees for the original reward grant from 25 to 40. By also reducing the travel award, we can award more people some amount of coverage for their conference expenses,” Ferris said.
